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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

During the breakdown of an unhappy marriage, writer Joanna Walsh got a job as a hotel reviewer, and began to gravitate towards places designed as alternatives to home. Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies-the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation, hotels.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Joanna Walsh has written for Granta, the London Review of Books, n+1, The White Review, The Guardian, Narrative Magazine, The European Short Story Network, Tate, and others. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Fractals, and a visual diary of London, London Walks!, now in its third printing. Her writing has been selected for Best British Short Stories (2014).